crime rate drop excluding California would be significantly lower. By taking California's crime rate drop out of the national average in order to compare California to the rest of the nation one would expect California's crime rate drop to be even more significant in comparison to the national average. California accounted for approximately 15% of all violent crime in the United States in 1998 and approximately 11% of all crime in the FBI index in 1998. In order to effectively compare California to the rest of the nation, one must exclude California from the nation's crime index figures.

According to the California Attorney General report of March, 1998, utilizing California and national statistics through 1997,

"California's drop in crime is nearly double that experienced in the other 49 states combined [through 1997] - 30% drop in California compared to a 17.4% decline for the rest of the nation. California is also doing substantially better in the violent crime rate compared to the rest of the nation - 26.9% versus an 18.2% decline."

CONCLUSION

The question asked by this forum is whether Three Strikes has been successful? The answer to that question depends on the objective of the law. Based on previous studies that supported the view that a small percentage of career criminals were responsible for the large percentage of crime, Three Strikes sought to identify and target those individuals. The objective was to isolate those career criminals and habitual offenders through the use of a sentencing law. By isolating these offenders and removing them from the population through an applied sentencing policy it was intended that serious and violent crime rates would drop. Analysis by entities such as the Rand Corporation supported this conclusion. Has Three Strikes been successful in accomplishing its objective? I think by any statistical approach the answer is unavoidable. The policies of the Three Strikes law have been instrumental in accomplishing the dramatic drop in crime rates that have occurred since 1993. I would

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